Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume I, Part 1: 1835-1866 eBook

an ascending scale had finally produced man.
Macfarlane said that the scheme had stopped there,
and failed; that man had retrograded; that man’s
heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom:
that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness,
drunkenness—­almost the only animal that
could endure personal uncleanliness. He said
that man’s intellect was a depraving addition
to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far
below the other beasts, though it enabled him to keep
them in servitude and captivity, along with many members
of his own race.

They were long, fermenting discourses that young Samuel
Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane’s
room, and those who knew the real Mark Twain and his
philosophies will recognize that those evenings left
their impress upon him for life.

XXII

THE OLD CALL OF THE RIVER

When spring came, with budding life and quickening
impulses; when the trees in the parks began to show
a hint of green, the Amazonian idea developed afresh,
and the would-be coca-hunter prepared for his expedition.
He had saved a little money—­enough to take
him to New Orleans—­and he decided to begin
his long trip with a peaceful journey down the Mississippi,
for once, at least, to give himself up to that indolent
luxury of the majestic stream that had been so large
a part of his early dreams.

The Ohio River steamers were not the most sumptuous
craft afloat, but they were slow and hospitable.
The winter had been bleak and hard. “Spring
fever” and a large love of indolence had combined
in that drowsy condition which makes one willing to
take his time.

Mark Twain tells us in Life on the Mississippi that
he “ran away,” vowing never to return
until he could come home a pilot, shedding glory.
This is a literary statement. The pilot ambition
had never entirely died; but it was coca and the Amazon
that were uppermost in his head when he engaged passage
on the Paul Jones for New Orleans, and so conferred
immortality on that ancient little craft. He bade
good-by to Macfarlane, put his traps aboard, the bell
rang, the whistle blew, the gang-plank was hauled
in, and he had set out on a voyage that was to continue
not for a week or a fortnight, but for four years—­four
marvelous, sunlit years, the glory of which would
color all that followed them.

In the Mississippi book the author conveys the impression
of being then a boy of perhaps seventeen. Writing
from that standpoint he records incidents that were
more or less inventions or that happened to others.
He was, in reality, considerably more than twenty-one
years old, for it was in April, 1857, that he went
aboard the Paul Jones; and he was fairly familiar
with steamboats and the general requirements of piloting.
He had been brought up in a town that turned out pilots;
he had heard the talk of their trade. One at
least of the Bowen boys was already on the river while